“Right, if the raft flips, you need to get to the front or back and find an air pocket. Don’t put your legs down, or they’ll get trapped under a bloody rock and you’ll drown. And don’t smack your head on a rock - they’ll be pretty hard to see in the dark. But we should be sweet.”

Josh James is New Zealand’s answer to Bear Grylls. Tall, bearded and intense, ‘The Kiwi Bushman’ is a pastiche of what it means to be a man’s man in this country. Based in the tiny yet historic township of Ross on the West Coast of the South Island, James is a jetboating, deer-hunting, tahr-killing, fish-catching wildman.

This, the first profile of James and his family, was the cover story of the Feb/March 2017 issue of New Zealand Geographic - the last issue under editor James Frankham.